Humans have never really valued objects. We value the shared stories a group of strangers agrees to believe about them: that a piece of paper is money, that a signature transfers a claim nobody can touch, that a company’s name is worth more than its assets. A truck is worth roughly what any other truck is worth, anywhere in the world. A demand system, a customer’s habit of calling the same company back, exists only because enough people keep believing it will keep working, which is exactly why buyers keep paying real money for it.
A private equity firm does not write a check because it likes trucks. A truck loses value the moment it leaves the dealer’s lot, needs new tires every couple of years, and sits half-idle most weeks. If a moving company’s real worth lived in its fleet, buying one would look a lot like buying a rental car company: capital-heavy, thin-margin, unloved by anyone chasing a return. Yet moving, relocation, and storage businesses keep changing hands for real money, sold by families who spent decades building them to buyers who have never lifted a couch.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it answers a question most operators never get asked directly: what is this business worth, and to whom? When an outside buyer with no sentimental stake in the brand puts a number on a company, that number appraises the business more honestly than anything the founder could write about it. Four real, documented deals in and around this exact industry point at the same answer, repeatedly, across two decades and several different kinds of buyer. None of them paid for the trucks. They paid for the routes, the contracts, and the demand system sitting behind the fleet, the machinery that keeps the phone ringing whether or not this particular owner ever answers it personally.
What Roark bought when it bought the fastest-growing moving franchise in the country
Roark Capital, an Atlanta-based private equity firm, acquired ServiceMaster Brands in 2020, a deal that industry deal-trackers value at roughly $1.55 billion. On August 3, 2021, ServiceMaster Brands used that platform to acquire TWO MEN AND A TRUCK, a family-owned moving franchise launched in Lansing, Michigan in 1985. The deal announcement described it as the fastest-growing franchised moving company in the country: more than 380 locations across 46 states plus Canada, the UK, and Ireland.
That franchise’s own structure argues against assuming Roark bought a fleet. The brand’s own franchise disclosure filings require a new Metro-market location to start with at least two trucks, purchased and financed by the local franchisee, not the franchisor. Every one of those trucks sits on an individual owner-operator’s balance sheet. Franchisees pay ServiceMaster the other direction: a royalty of 6% of gross revenue, a 1% contribution to a national marketing fund, and a technology and support fee on top. ServiceMaster’s CEO at the time, Elane Stock, described the fit as TWO MEN AND A TRUCK’s “deeply ingrained culture of customer service” and the “capabilities of their franchise network.” Neither phrase mentions a truck. The purchase price for the moving-company deal itself was never disclosed, but the mechanics of what changed hands are public: a brand, a training system, a national marketing engine, and a royalty stream collected automatically off hundreds of independent operators’ revenue, forever, without ServiceMaster ever owning a single vehicle.
The company sold four times that never owned a truck
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice formed SIRVA in 1998 to acquire North American Van Lines, added Allied Van Lines and Pickfords the following year, and took the combined company public on the NYSE in 2003. SIRVA filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and emerged as a private company owned by Aurora Resurgence and Equity Group Investments. Madison Dearborn Partners bought it in May 2018. In August 2024, a group of credit funds led by KKR Credit Advisors, Evolution Credit Partners, BlackRock Financial Management, and Indaba Capital Management took control in a recapitalization. Madison Dearborn and Relo Group stayed on as equity sponsors.
In every one of those four deals, the trucks belonged to somebody else. SIRVA’s own filings around its 2003 IPO describe a network of roughly 760 independent moving agents operating around 7,800 vehicles, not a company-owned fleet. A client book kept changing hands instead: by SIRVA’s own account at the time, the company served 38% of the Fortune 500 across 2,500 corporate accounts. It also carries a government-relocation arm still branded BGRS. BGRS holds a GSA Schedule 48 contract and states it has managed more than 147,500 federal relocations since 1984. SIRVA merged with BGRS in 2022. The combined company is now a strategic partner inside HomeSafe Alliance, the consortium led by KBR and Tier One Relocation that now runs household-goods moves for the U.S. Department of Defense. Four different kinds of capital bought the same asset, one after another: a leveraged buyout shop in 1998, a distressed-debt investor in 2008, a mainstream PE fund in 2018, and a syndicate of credit funds in 2024. Each one paid for a book of corporate and government relocation contracts that renews on roughly its own schedule, largely indifferent to which name sits on the ownership ledger that quarter.
A box, not a truck, makes the same point twice
Arcapita, a Bahrain-based investment firm, bought PODS in 2007 for $430 million. Arcapita went into Chapter 11 in 2012, and PODS was restructured under new management, reportedly including Atlanta’s Eagle Merchant Partners. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan then bought the company outright in February 2015 for more than $1 billion. That doubled Arcapita’s original stake in eight years.
PODS’ containers depreciate the same way a truck does: steel boxes sitting in a yard, repainted on a schedule, replaced when they wear out. A Canadian pension fund managing $140.8 billion in assets at the time of that deal was not chasing box depreciation curves. Lee Sienna, who ran the deal for Ontario Teachers, said PODS fit the fund’s criteria for “steady cash flow” and “long-term growth potential.” Pension-fund money paid up for the same combination twice in eight years: a scheduling system that tracks which of roughly 150,000 containers sits free on a given day, a brand that turned into shorthand for the whole product category the way Kleenex did for tissue, and a footprint spanning the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. The actual containers just sat in yards, doing what steel does.
“Isn’t this just what private equity always does?”
Yes, mostly. Private equity has run the same asset-light, recurring-revenue playbook across plumbing, HVAC, veterinary care, and dental practices for most of the last decade. None of that is unique to moving. A skeptical operator reading this far is right to ask whether these four deals prove anything about the industry specifically, or just confirm what PE always wants everywhere.
This is not only a private-equity habit, either. Extra Space Storage, a publicly traded REIT, agreed in April 2023 to acquire its rival Life Storage in an all-stock deal worth $12.7 billion. The deal closed that July. The combined company carried more than 3,500 locations and an enterprise value near $47 billion, according to SEC filings and coverage at the time. A self-storage building is a simpler asset than a moving fleet: four walls, a roll-up door, no engine to maintain. Public shareholders still paid a premium priced on occupancy, location density, and customer retention, not on the replacement cost of the buildings themselves. Storage and moving sit right next to each other in how people experience relocating. Capital in both categories keeps landing on the same answer: pay for who already shows up, not for what they show up in.
The honest answer to the skeptic’s question still needs a real counter-example, not just more agreement. Private equity does buy physical trucking capacity directly, and recently. DC Velocity, a logistics trade publication, reported in March 2022 that PE-backed buyers were acquiring full-truckload carriers, specialized heavy-haul and reefer fleets, and freight brokerages at pace during the tight-capacity freight market of the pandemic recovery. Uber Freight paid $2.25 billion for Transplace in 2021, a deal built almost entirely around freight capacity and brokerage relationships in a market where capacity itself was scarce enough to price at a premium.
That deal is the exception that clarifies the rule rather than breaking it. In a spot-market freight crunch, hauling capacity is genuinely the scarce, sellable thing, so buyers pay for capacity. Household relocation does not run that way in most weeks of most years. Trucks and crews sit available across nearly every metro market outside the June-to-August peak. Nobody is short on capacity to move a three-bedroom house on a random Tuesday in March. The scarce thing is a reliable mechanism for filling that non-scarce capacity with a customer who already trusts the name enough to say yes on the estimate call. That mechanism is what every one of the four deals above paid for. Same investor logic in both markets. Different asset, because a different thing is actually scarce.
The same $500,000 operator, priced two ways
This publication has modeled an illustrative operator before, and it holds up here too: a hundred moves a year at $5,000 average revenue, $500,000 a year, run out of a modest yard. A buyer pricing that business on fleet alone might count eight aging 26-foot box trucks, worth something like $30,000 to $50,000 apiece on the resale market once depreciation and mileage are accounted for. The fleet’s resale value comes to roughly $320,000 in total, about two-thirds of one year’s revenue, and it’s gone the moment the trucks are sold off or handed to a new owner who values them the same way. That is a rough illustration, not a quoted valuation, but it is the number a buyer arrives at when the fleet is genuinely all that is on offer.
The same $500,000 operator looks different with a Direct Demand Ratio of 45%, the metric this publication has argued operators should be tracking. Roughly $225,000 of that revenue arrives every year without a fresh acquisition cost: repeat customers, referrals, and organic search the business owns outright. Three corporate accounts under standing service agreements that renew automatically each January add to that total, the same kind of book SIRVA has been sold on four times over. That operator is not selling trucks at resale value. That operator is selling a demand system a buyer can plug new capital into and grow, the exact mechanism that made Roark pay for TWO MEN AND A TRUCK’s franchise network and made four separate investor groups pay for SIRVA’s contract book across twenty-six years. The trucks come along in both scenarios. Only one of them changes what a buyer is willing to pay for.
This valuation gap is the sharpest version of an industry-wide pattern: an operator can be busier every year worth less every year, and a buyer’s price tag is where that catches up first.
What a buyer’s diligence team actually asks to see
A real acquirer’s due diligence checklist for a business like this looks nothing like a fleet maintenance log. It asks for contract renewal history by account, going back several years, to see whether relationships hold or churn. It also wants to know what share of revenue comes from the top three referral sources or platforms, because concentration in one outside channel is a risk the buyer inherits on day one, and a federal lender already puts a number on where that starts. It asks for a Direct Demand Ratio, or something close to it under a different name, because a buyer wants to know how much of next year’s revenue is already spoken for before a single new dollar is spent finding it. It wants to see the CRM too, not to check whether one exists, but to see whether repeat-customer data has been tracked and used with any discipline. And it checks whether the business holds any standing government or corporate contract vehicles, and when those come up for renewal.
None of that shows up on a standard profit-and-loss statement, which is exactly why most operators have never been asked these questions before a buyer showed up asking them. A P&L records what the business earned. It says nothing about which part of that revenue would survive a change of ownership and which part would need to be rebuilt from zero. Those two numbers can differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars on a business the same size as the one above.
The SBA’s new rule tests whether the revenue survives the sale
Most operators reading this are not in a sale process, which makes a diligence checklist easy to file under someday. That filing is getting harder to justify. These questions are moving out of a buyer’s private judgment and into the rulebook that decides how much money a buyer is allowed to borrow.
The Small Business Administration’s revised lending policy, SOP 50 10 8.1, takes effect on October 1, 2026. For an initial acquisition or a business expansion where the purchase price reaches $3 million or more, it requires the lender to obtain an independent Quality of Earnings report before approving the loan. The SOP then specifies what that report has to cover. It “must assess the quality and sustainability of the business’s revenue base, including customer concentration risk, contract continuity, and the likelihood that existing revenue and margins will be maintained post-sale.”
That last clause turns a private buyer’s worry into written federal lending policy. An independent professional now has to put in writing whether the revenue keeps arriving once the founder stops answering the phone. And the consequence is financial rather than advisory: where the report’s numbers do not support the valuation and the proposed debt structure, the SOP says the loan amount “must be reduced accordingly.”
Three million dollars sits well above the illustrative operator modeled earlier, and a $500,000 business is not commissioning a Quality of Earnings report next year. The mechanism still reaches down, because it sets the ceiling on what a financed buyer can offer. A buyer whose lender will not fund the price does not pay the price.
The same document already puts a number on concentration in a different context. On SBA working-capital lines, receivables from any single customer above 20% of the total are kept out of the eligible borrowing base without the agency’s prior written consent, unless the account clears one of five narrow exceptions. A fifth of the total from one source is where a federal lender stops calling it a relationship and starts calling it a risk.
What the price tag was already telling you
The pattern across TWO MEN AND A TRUCK, SIRVA, PODS, and storage’s own consolidation wave holds whether or not any specific operator plans to sell next year, or ever: the market is grading, in real dollars, which parts of a moving business are worth building, something an owner’s own instincts rarely do. Nobody paid a premium for a well-maintained fleet alone in any of these deals. Every real premium sat on the demand side of the business, a franchise royalty stream, a federal contract book, a container-scheduling network, never on the labor and equipment side.
An operator who spends the next year adding a truck is spending money on the part of this business a buyer would write down to resale value on day one. An operator who spends that same year building a Direct Demand Ratio, a repeat-customer base, or a standing contract with even one corporate account is spending money on the only part of this business that has survived every one of these ownership changes intact. Movaros exists to help an operator build that second thing directly, the demand system a buyer would pay for, instead of waiting for someone else’s acquisition offer to be the first one to say so.
The demand system runs under your brand, not a marketplace’s
Enquiry, estimate and follow-up on your own domain and your own routes: the part of the business a buyer would price.
